--- In
psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, "mlrogers2002" <mlrogers2002@...> wrote:
>
>
> There are lots of things I'd like to see happen with PTB, and I'd love to work on it, but... I don't have the time to do it alone. I could put in time if others who are also skilled at programming and science (and electronics is good too), or just have a need for it, wanted to organize something together - maybe we need a foundation of sorts?
>
Care to share what those "lots of things" are? We have a feature request page on the Wiki, but i don't see your name there. Another new good place for feature requests now is the Google issue tracker: <
http://code.google.com/p/psychtoolbox-3/issues/list>
If you tell people what you want, maybe they point you to existing solutions or self-organize? Or if you just start contributing code, maybe someone else finds it useful and wants to work with you?
My experience with code contributions and volunteers in the last 6 years was that the amount of actual useful work contributed was inversely proportional to the amount of setup and startup overhead they required before they would actually do anything. Some people with phd's in computer-science and other credentials for coding skills and some companies even managed to delay development of important new features by over a year by "offering help" and requiring setup overhead, without ever doing anything substantial in the end.
For small code contributions people usually just e-mail me updated files or preferrably patches for review and integration. People who prove to be consistent/competent providers of improvements usually quickly get commit access to our repo. And since our main development repo is on GitHub, based on the git version control system... <
https://github.com/kleinerm/Psychtoolbox-3>
... it should rather simple to just fork that repo, do complex development and then send pull requests, or coordinate collaborative development of more complex or intrusive features. In the end you'd need to coordinate with me anyway for complex stuff so there won't be clashes in the development of features.
I don't see how a foundation could help with software development? Also, really large scale software projects like Linux were able to grow for a long time without a foundation behind them. Imho it would just increase the administrative overhead without increasing the available manpower. This btw. is the result of the election of the board of directors of the XOrg foundation:
<
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA3MTc>
Despite providing the bases of pretty much any operating systems GUI (except MS-Windows) since 25 yeras, and having hundreds of active developers from probably dozens of companies (e.g. Intel, IBM, AMD, VMWare, RedHat, Oracle, ...), academia and volunteers, and 144 official members, they barely managed to get enough voters to complete elections. I also know that there is quite a bit of paperwork involved, because i attended their 2010 meeting (Video here: <
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peCG_aM45-o>).
I assume a foundation would be useful if there were significant donations of money to the project involved, significant enough that people don't trust or can't use a less formal process of handling donations.
Wrt. to funding of ptb development, i don't know. It is nice to know that at least a few people would be willing to donate. We've toyed half-seriously in the past with something like a PayPal button or similar, but never thought it through.
In the past (many years ago), i think Denis Pelli and NYU had some "Core vision grant" with some money allocated to ptb's development, but i don't know the details. I guess if we tried to do something similar in the future we would need to proof ptb's wide-spread usage and usefulness by something like a large citation count on a to-be-published article about ptb-3, or having some list of grant-supported research projects that use ptb-3. For ptb-2 such lists were collected, <
http://psychtoolbox.org/PTB-3/grants.html>, but not updated in at least 5 years afaik. Maybe we should revive that.
Our download counter has exceeded 88888 downloads and the conservative count of unique installations also just passed the 30000 mark last week, but i doubt that would really count as proof, given that these counts are created by ourselves, on servers under our control, anonymously without a way to track back who installed ptb where.
Last week i stumbled over this interesting approach from the world of startups: Crowd-funding of scientific research projects: <
http://www.petridish.org/>, article about it here: <
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/petridish-aims-to-crowdfund-science-and-research-projects/>. Doing a 64-bit os/x port of ptb would sound rather boring though, compared to the featured projects.
At the moment, ptb's development is not officially formally funded at all. Most of my work was just spare-time coding on late evenings, weekends and "vacations". Since ptb also became a core part of my regular PhD project during the last years, i was also spending some fraction of my graduate student work time on it, following the "eat your own dog food" approach to software testing, while being supported by a stipend from the Max Planck Society, specifically by Prof. Dr. Heinrich Buelthoff at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen. So currently the development is basically powered by Prof. Buelthoff's goodwill (thank you!) and my obsessive compulsive approach to "recreational coding" and geeky definition of fun. Then there are the occassional donations of hardware for development and testing, e.g., from Cambridge Research Systems and VPixx Inc., even a FireGL graphics card from AMD and other bits...
Not sure how to conclude this, but there's more work to do before the beta release.
-mario
> --- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, "ptballthumbs" <hyunah1112@> wrote:
> >
> > I'm interested in chipping in, too! I don't have a suggestion in term of how but if a system is set up, I'm more than willing to help!
> >
> > --- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, Keith Schneider <keiths@> wrote:
> > >
> > > If we all chipped in a bit from our grants, we each wouldn't need to pay very much, I think. I'm willing to contribute. We could even hire someone just to do the 64-bit port, though I don't know how much that would cost...
> > >
> > > keith
> > >
> > > On Mar 8, 2012, at 12:44 PM, IanA wrote:
> > >
> > > > --- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, "Mario" <mario.kleiner@> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Wrt. to a 64-Bit version for os/x i can't give you reliable estimates, just that most of it will very likely complete for the most part within this year. I'm still the only person doing any serious amount of C development on the toolbox and PTB development is still just an insanely time intensive "hobby" for a large part, beyond the bits i actually need for my own projects. I need to get a thesis finished and submitted. Once that is done i'll start to look into the 64-bit port. Now the thesis will be done, according to some outdated estimates of mine, in -6 months, -3 months, now and in approximately 3 months...
> > > >
> > > > Dear All,
> > > >
> > > > There are a substantial number of labs using PTB on OS X. Does anyone know of a viable route to get some focused funding to allow Mario the resources to do this. It would be great to see the PTB move forward with something other than the singular sterling efforts of Mario, or at least with some funding to purchase him a modern computer and Matlab licence to more easily fix things.
> > > >
> > > > Ian
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
>